Men of war

[Wardly]

Ok this is my first mod and i'm sure there will be lots to learn. Such as there are a number of people that for one reason or another don't use steam workshop!

Men of war adds the ability to manage your units in groups of units. Each unit is treated as a platoon and is given a platoon number and a unique callsign. Each platoon is placed in a company and a company has a default of 4 platoons but you can move any number of platoons into and out of a company as you want. So now you can have the 1st Armored assaulting while the 2nd Infantry is holding up the rear and the 3rd Naval Battle Group is providing fire support.

• Randomly generates unique unit names
• Unique platoon and company numbers
• Company highlighting
• Stat tracking (damage done/taken, kills, hometown, service length)
• Manually name units
• Manually assign/transfer units to companies

There is a long list of things i'd like to do but the goal is to provide a different feel to unit management. There will ultimately be combat ribbons, medals and even company level specializations which will provide unit bonuses. However a balance would need to be maintained.

My graphical ability is that of a blind quadriplegic, so the mod will most likely not provide a whole lot of visual changes to the game.

But if you run into issues let me know. The following are the only known (to me) issues,

1. gifted units are not assigned to a company (e.g. the alien you get for exploring the skeleton site)
2. data not saved in the event of a crash. The mod uses TableSaver which of course can't catch a crash. So there isn't a lot i can do if the game crashes. Auto-save saves game data so you'll lose what you had from the last save up to the crash.

So have fun and let me know if you have any suggestions, ideas, bugs, horror stories, issues, thoughts, or anything else

Steam: Download
Civfanatics: Download

If the downloads are working please let me know.

 

[DioAurion]

Cool idea. Will try ito outhe after the big update.

 

[tangent]

Good to see you here too Wardly. I can confirm the mod works well within workshop and out of it. (I've had other issues since "The Fall" patch, but this mod is still working so far)

 

[LakeSolon]

I've been using it without issues.

I haven't been watching the info closely but I like that it gives a bit of extra depth. When I *want* to keep track of units I *can*.

It might be helpful if you described in a little more detail the logic for how companies are assigned by default, etc.

 

[alysander]

Very nice mod, i think u must enhance it with more different perks/specialisations (if this is possible).

 

[ShadoWarrior]

Great mod! And it works with game version 1.0.1.607, too. Any chance that we can get an update to this mod that applies to air units as well?

 

[MindXX]

Can you put the mod here as I cannot DL from Steam. Thank you.

 

[Wardly]

The mod is here. it's in the first post below the images.

 

[DanielUA]

Very interesting mod but it is certainly bad idea to treat units as platoons.
You know platoon is just few dozens of soldiers.
When I played at Massive map and I had a real World War happening there I had perhaps 20 units.
So what, I had about 20 platoons, or less than 1000 soldiers, and this was my great army which has counquered half of the continent?
I suggest to use word "Corps" instead of "platoon"
and "Army" instead of "company"
That would mean that my big 20 unit army numbered about 1 mln people which does make sense.
Today, at the peacetime, China has 2.3 mln soldiers.
USA - 1.4 mln, India - 1.3 mln, Russia - 845 000, Turkey - 610 000.
France, Italy, Spain and Portugal together - 560 000, and this is not even the whole Franko-Iberia union!
70 mln people were drafted during the WWI and 110 mln during the WWII.

 

[_Iceberg_]

In the US, a platoon has 3 to 4 squads of 10 in the Army and 3 to 4 squads of 13 in the Marine Corps. 3 to 4 platoons in a Company, 3 to 4 companies to a battalion, 3 to 4 battalions to a regiment etc... I personally approve of the choice to treat units on a platoon basis, especially since this is a colony starting out on a new world, and those usually do not start with a full fledged army corps of thousands. The percentage of a population in the armed forces is generally a little less than 1%.

 

[DanielUA]

Hey Icerg! I am now playing with such a great mod as InfoAddict. I'm sure you know it because it's civ5 version is very popular as I remember. It gives such information as "Number of active military".
It gives 4 000 - 5 000 people to a unit. So what about using this as a basis ("brigade" and "corps" or "division")? that would make your mod integrated with InfoAddict

One more request also - could you please make a lite version totally without companies and company improvements? Just with unique name, stat tracking and number to a unit?

 

[Foch]

Any chance of getting an updated version for direct download? Love the concept, but I'm getting some bugs with the version from the OP (e.g. v1 from 12/5/14). Thanks! <3

 

[Wardly]

The choice of using platoon/company wasn't a focal point in designing the mod. Originally i was going to give the user the ability to name them whatever they wanted. However it was my first mod and i wasn't sure if it would be of interest to anybody other then myself. So not a whole lot of weight was placed into making it more flexible in the beginning.

@_Iceberg_ you have a similar mod? I'd be interested in seeing it and how you've done yours. Do you have a link?

@Foch I'll get an updated version when i get home. I haven't made a lot of changes to it recently. I've kind of went back to the drawing board with some suggestions and am writing a new one for Civ 5 since that seems to be the number one request at this point.

Some changes that i've already made in the newer civ 5 version is a reduction on the importance of the "platoon" and more about the company/battalion/brigade/army/<insert whatever you want to call it>. Each unit will still get it's callsign, but there wont be anymore verbiage regarding it's "platoon" (still up in the air).

Currently in this version you can't mix and match units in a company, you can have soldiers and rangers in an "Infantry Company" but nothing else. Some people have complained that this lumps artillery with standard armor units and such. So the newer Civ 5 version will allow you to mix any units of the same domain in a company. So now you can now put armor, infantry, and artillery all in the same company or you can separate them entirely by creating a new company for each if that's your thing.

Also i've added new tables to track overall kills, so i'll be able to show total number of any units killed. This is more for future plans to add a little more immersion. What i'd like to get to eventually is that when you enter a war with somebody a kill count starts. At the end of the war (or just a report you call up anytime) a report will popup giving number of units that were killed on both sides. Now keep in mind that currently i haven't built out the report or anything. Just written the data table and mechanism on the back end to handle storing the data (which is the easy part)

There are some differences between Civ 5 and Civ BE. Once i've gotten the Civ 5 version running i'll revisit the Civ BE mod and redo it to be more closely matched to the Civ 5 version in hopes of making it so that once i write something for one it'll be usable in both.

 

[_Iceberg_]

One thing I forgot to mention is that less than 1% of the armed forces (that 1% of the population) is actually combat arms, much less infantry. The vast majority of the military is comprised of POGs (person's other than grunts) The only reason I know this is that it was drilled into me at the School of Infantry at Camp Pendleton California way back when I was in the Marine Corps. I never said I had a different mod, at least nothing that isn't a complete rip off of someone else's work for my own amusement.

 

[Wardly]

... I never said I had a different mod, at least nothing that isn't a complete rip off of someone else's work for my own amusement.

Sorry i must have misread DanielUA comments.

 

[Foch]

After playing with Men of War a bit more, the main issue I'm having is that when a unit is destroyed, all of the other units in the company (or possibly the unit type? I haven't yet tested this with multiple companies active) get wiped. The entire pane of info disappears.

Also, I reckon aliens aren't counted as kills? I haven't had occasion to kill any humans yet, so I wasn't sure if I was having a broader issue or if that was a choice/limitation that's working as intended.

Thanks again for working on it, it's quite pleasing when it's working properly.

 

[Wardly]

After playing with Men of War a bit more, the main issue I'm having is that when a unit is destroyed, all of the other units in the company (or possibly the unit type? I haven't yet tested this with multiple companies active) get wiped. The entire pane of info disappears.

Also, I reckon aliens aren't counted as kills? I haven't had occasion to kill any humans yet, so I wasn't sure if I was having a broader issue or if that was a choice/limitation that's working as intended.

Thanks again for working on it, it's quite pleasing when it's working properly.

It sounds like your having a few different issues. You should never lose stats for your units if a different unit dies. Also aliens do count towards your kill/damage (done/received) totals.

I'm working on the mod now (since the civ5 mod crashed and burned, why change the unit ids on upgrade firaxis!).

How many games have you played with the mod and how many have shown this type of behavior? Your the first so far to present this issue.

 

[ImperialGuard]

I saw this mod in action in a Let's Play video, and man it looks awesome

I'm so glad you made this mod, one of the things that bugged me about Civ:BE was they took away the ability to name your own units

But this takes it HUGE steps forward!!

Thanks so much for this mod! PLEASE keep updating it!! I really hope you will update for BERT.

thanks again mate